Finally the work that has been going on for close to an year now gets published – the book is now available: “SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn Joes 2 Pros®: A Tutorial for Implementing High Availability and Disaster Recovery using AlwaysOn Availability Groups” (Paperback, Kindle). We have been working on this project with so much heart for an year now. Writing a book is an unique experience and to see it on the bookshelves is yet another feeling. We are excited beyond imagination on the release of this book. A special thanks to Balmukund Lakhani (Blog | Twitter) to author with me in this adventure.

Why AlwaysOn?

This story can be really interesting. We turned a corridor conversation into an informational product. The task for us was to write around 100 pages of book on this niche topic. As we started writing, a real scope creep did happen to our surprise. We kept on contemplating, let us add this topic and that and so on. Actually a 6*9 dimension book spanned for more than 530 pages, so we had to shrink this mega book. Instead of compromising the content, we converted the book to a bigger 10*7 dimension to bring the number of pages to 422 :). We are excited with the content and the initial technical review from a MCM has been really promising.

The journey to write about AlwaysOn was really simple. SQL Server 2012 release has been exciting times but to our surprise there is no single book out there in the market that can give structured learning to AlwaysOn Availability Groups. So we planned to write from the basics for a DBA who has no clue how to work with SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn Availability Groups. We have detailed and brought every single nuances of AlwaysOn Availability Group technologies in this book. We are confident we can add another 100 pages with so much more to share. So stay tuned as we will bring the second edition with more content based on your feedbacks.

PS: At this moment we don’t have any other channel to publish this book in India. Our publisher is in constant pursuit to look for alternatives, till then Amazon will the only channel.

18 Chapters at glance:

Chapter 1. High Availability and Disaster Recovery Concepts

Chapter 2. Existing High Availability and Disaster Recovery Options

Chapter 3. What is AlwaysOn?

Chapter 4. Understanding Quorum Models

Chapter 5. AlwaysOn Availability Groups

Chapter 6. Availability Group (AG) Actions on the Secondary

Chapter 7. Deploying AlwaysOn Availability Groups

Chapter 8. Features of AlwaysOn Availability Groups

Chapter 9. AlwaysOn Monitoring and Troubleshooting

Chapter 10. AlwaysOn Diagnostics

Chapter 11. AlwaysOn Advanced Monitoring

Chapter 12. Deployment Variations of AlwaysOn

Chapter 13. AlwaysOn Common Issues

Chapter 14. Availability Group Failover

Chapter 15. Migrating from Previous High Availability Scenarios

Chapter 16. AlwaysOn Availability Group Maintenance Activities

Chapter 17. AlwaysOn – FAQs

Chapter 18. SQL Server 2014 – AlwaysOn Enhancements Teaser

This is a long list and we will keep reading the content over and over again to make sure this meets the quality bar we set to ourselves. If there are any suggestions, improvements and additions to content – please drop a line to me. We will be more than happy to include the same as we expand the book in its second edition including content for SQL Server 2014 specifics.

As I sign off, I want to specifically call out two people from my team who have backed me in this adventure of learning and sharing via this book – Govind Kanshi (Technical Director – MTC) and Aniruddha Deswandikar (Director MTC). It would have been impossible to deliver this book without their unconditional support.

Thanks again to all my readers who have inspired me in writing content. I am honored from your kind words every single day and I am sure you will find this book useful as you learn SQL Server 2012 or SQL Server 2014 AlwaysOn.